Into Town

By the next afternoon, Lee finally had managed to reach the town that he had been seeing the traces of. There was a straight road running through the settlement, the river looking as if it was looping around the outskirts and bordering the collection of homes.

Lee walked along the road and noted that there was a crossroads at the centre of the village, a hush descending on all the people milling around.

They stopped and stared at Lee, as he continued to walk along to the crossroads. He looked towards the right and saw a building larger than all the others, and grander too, with windchimes and flags hanging off its presumably timber roof.

On the other side, there looked to be a giant magnolia tree, with a collection of children and two old priests, decked with trademark acetic robes and shaved heads, teaching to them. One of the men reached up with one arm and began to walk towards Lee.

The path in front of Lee lead to a wide open road, out of the forest and bordered by fields of tilled land, men leaning over and breaking their backs, sowing the seeds in for the next harvest. The man, who had raised his arm, walked closer to Lee, his boots thundering down onto the earth with each and every step.

The people around him waited, in baited breath, for something to happen, knowing that a man, emerging from the forest, could only spell change for the town. Would he be bringing the monster to them? Was he here to claim, falsely again, that the monster had been slain?

Lee decided that, before he left town on the path ahead, to hopefully somewhere more populous, he needed to buy his pot, to finally cook his rice, and a map to know what and where exactly he was going to be walking into. He looked back to the right, and spied the market stalls that lined the road that lead up to whoever was responsible for running this town.

Unfortunately, there was no temple here. Lee would also need to ask the monks where it was to report everything that he had seen.

A heavy hand landed on Lee's shoulder.

"What were you doing in the forest?" a heavy, tense voice asked Lee.

Lee turned around and looked at the large, burly man that had singled him out. There was a crowd of onlookers surrounding them, and beginning to block out any potential escape routes, encircling them and looking as if they were only a single sentence away from jeering at Lee.

Lee looked up into the eyes of man, only holding his gaze for a second, before his eyes dropped down to the floor once more.

He was exhausted, walking for days and quite hungry. This man was healthy, taller than Lee, broader than Lee, and seemed to have a pre-prepared answer that he was expecting to hear from Lee - an answer which Lee didn't even know.

He glanced at the crowd and saw their faces ravenous and hungry for the answer that he would give.

"I was travelling," Lee answered, deciding to at least be half truthful. He would gain nothing if he told them that he was a runaway groom, and he at least didn't look like one. His clothes were sturdy, his boots sturdier, and the pack on his back looking like a fairly decent collection of travelling equipment, as long as nobody opened it.

"And why were you travelling through the forest, speak boy," the man gruffly asked him, huffing as Lee kept his eyes locked on the ground.

Lee forced his body to stay relaxed, unmoving, and not flinch here and now. The man was now curious about him, and Lee had backed himself into a corner. How was he supposed to brush off his travels through woods that contained a man eating monster? What the hell could justify that?

Lee scanned through the items on his person, hoping for something that would inspire some sort of excuse for himself. He had packed himself water, food, and herbs, and-

Lee pulled his belongings off his back and laid them on the ground, sifting through them to try and find the water skin that he had stuffed with herbs, just in case he ever needed them. He rummaged through the area where he remembered placing them, and pulled it out and opened it.

He held up to the man to examine, hoping that his questioner didn't have much prior knowledge of herbs and their properties. Lee scanned the crowd and noticed that the monks weren't present here, and hoped that they wouldn't join the suspicious mob that had formed.

The man who held the herb bag peered inside, and sniffed at the plants that had been plucked by Lee. He retied the water skin and handed it back to Lee, who placed it within its rightful place, and retied belongings back up.

"So what're so special about those herbs, boy?" the man asked, an eyebrow now raised, as he looked down at Lee, who slung his pack back over his shoulder.

"They're of especially high quality. I'm a traveller, doing odd jobs, and I was getting paid for collecting herbs. I got lost and found this one particularly rich grove in the forest. I found the river and then kept following it, until I got here," Lee lied, hoping that it would be enough for him to dodge suspicion and maybe even promote himself, still looking at the floor.

"You're a little young, aren't you?" the man asked him, trying to find any potential holes in the boy's story. The traveller was a boy, a fresh faced youth who hadn't even sprouted any facial hair yet - not even a hint of a mustache. No mother would let their son, that young, to travel from town to town.

"I'm an orphan, sir. My mother died in childbirth and my father a broken heart, not too long after. My grandma raised me, but she died when I was still a kid," Lee continued to lie.

He may nor may not have lifted the story from one of Shen's books, but the people in the tale reacted sympathetically enough for the child, in the story, to get a free meal. The man in front of Lee winced slightly, doing as exactly as Lee hoped, and feeling sorry for him.

"You, er, didn't happen to see anything strange in the forest, son," the man asked, slightly kinder now, thanks to Lee's stiff and awkward acting and lies.

"There was a monster of some kind. I saw some bright red light moving towards my camp, and I ran off with everything I could still grab, and left my supper and cooking pot behind. Have you seen it too? Wait, was that why the old man at the store, who I was working for sent me to do the work? 'Cause nobody else wanted to do it. What the hell!? Why did nobody tell me!?" Lee pretended to be angry and outraged, hoping that nobody could see that his hands and arms were shaking.

He hoped that everybody would think that the sweat that rolled down his forehead would be seen as a byproduct of the hot weather today, and his walking efforts through the forest. He hoped that his weak knees would be attributed to his exhaustion and his hard work for a non existent employer who had ripped him off.

Lee dimly wondered, trying not to look around, whether he could pass out here and now, as an escape from the judgement of the crowd.

He hoped that the lack of energy that he was displaying would simply be put down to hunger and thirst. It was the best he could hope for, right now.

"What's your name boy?" the man asked, apparently content with the answer that he had been given by Lee, looking at the fact that his arms were now crossed over his chest and his brow was no longer furrowed.

Lee moved to bow at him and introduced himself as Shen Lan, dropping the 'i' of his sister's name, and adopting his first love's own.

This would be the way he paid tribute to those who he loved, and the way he would honour their efforts for shaping him into who he was today.

"I see," the gruff man mused to himself.

He turned to point towards the market, the crowd parting to allow the path to clear.

"If you go to the stall second to the end, over there on the right, and then tell the lady there that Song Ning sent you, then you'll get a discount on the pot that you lost. My wife does the best pottery in the village. Ask the monks, and they'll draw you a map out for free, as long as you promise to visit their temple," the man explained, before stalking off, back to doing whatever he was doing before Lee arrived.

Wei Lee, or rather now Shen Lan, could work with this.